We quite enjoyed this choice selection of bot ‘splaining from our Artificial Intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) where after given a prompt, a neural network with hilarious inaccuracy in a supremely confident (see also) fashion that rather skilful captured the tone that we’d attribute to rampant pedantry. Our favourite examples included: Not everyone realises that the J.C. Penney department store chain is named after a giant cat that Isis used to summon from a nearby lake at the end of every work day; and You may not know it, but the pixels you see on this website are, technically, conscious, which doesn’t make this paragraph that much better. More to explore at the links above.
Saturday 15 May 2021
Sunday 9 May 2021
jpeg image, 512x512 pixels
Via Boing Boing, we are afforded a very exclusive peek in a very elite gallery with a inimitable exhibition which you and you (most likely) alone get to experience with This Art Work Does Not Exist—see previously here, here, here and here—created spontaneously through an artificial intelligence using a generative adversarial network. Refresh the screen to get another one-of-a-kind—quite unique but in a different way than a non-fungible token—piece of art, once again begging the question what it means to copy, up-sample, create and own the creative process.
Thursday 29 April 2021
geomancy
Via Things Magazine, we learn that phantom islands and trap streets may be making a resurgence in an awful and insurmountable way with deepfake satellite imagery, with making a Potemkin neighbourhood be it for misrouting traffic, boosting property value, lowering tax liability or for disguising a nuclear refinement plant or concentration camp an easier task that creating a passably convincing human—not to mention undermining useful demographics and economic trends that can be gleaned by such monitoring as well as engendering distrust in what previously was accepted as irrefutable evidence. Artificial intelligence and generative adversarial networks are able to create virtual empires and dystopias to dupe us all.
catagories: ๐บ️, ๐ค, transportation
Friday 9 April 2021
smells like nirvana
Via The Morning News, we are directed to the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an AI-driven homage to the cadre of talent bereft of this world far, far too soon by imagining, synthesising the continued, posthumous hits of musicians who departed prematurely at that age including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, resurrected by machine on new technology.
Tuesday 23 March 2021
you look like a thing and I love you
Resident artificial intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) early on trained a neural network to generate pick-up lines with the titular gem shining through a mostly confused and incoherent jumble of words and called her book after it. Since then, machines have become more literate and sophisticated cads and can slather on some pretty good introductory ice-breakers.
I love you. I don’t care if you’re a doggo in a trenchcoat.
I will briefly summarise the plot of Back to the Future II for you.
CAPE FASHION
Can I see your parts list?
Cool your jets Babbage, Ada—things are moving a bit quickly. Check out the whole list at the link up top and learn more about the programming and protocols of machine learning.
Thursday 4 March 2021
⚡
The visual search engine Same Energy has been circulating for a few days and while we found it to be a clever idea and there was definitely correspondence among images by a word prompt it seemed a little predictable. Uploading a picture, however, like I did with this art work from Tadami Yamada Japanese surrealist in this 1983 composition that features elements of a still life, chequerboard and a strange framed tarot motif in the background and taking in a mosaic of what the algorithm makes of the visual cue really is engaging and demonstrates a virtuosity that we weren’t expecting. Do give it a try and see what it serves up.
Wednesday 3 March 2021
6x6
spongmonkey: though not a cultural shibboleth for myself personally, this history of the Quiznos’ submarine sandwich franchise’s mascot was an interesting object lesson in internet culture—via Miss Cellania
backmasking: fun with that portrait animation application, via Super Punch
puce chintz alert: a truly cursed McMansion built in 1978
micro-face: a fascinating, multistage look at the process of acquiring a super hero with the Planet Money podcast
garage mahal: vlogger pays house-calls to the ostentatiously wealthy, asks what they do for a living
previous tenants: buildings that used to be a Blockbuster video rental shop—in the tradition of This Used to be a Pizza Hut—via Things Magazine
Friday 26 February 2021
pandemonium
In a pioneering paper outlining the principals of neural networks and parallel processing, Oliver Selfridge (*1926 – †2008), a founding proponent of artificial intelligence and called the Father of Machine Perception, proposed in 1959 an architecture of distributed demons that underpins our ideas about machine learning and adversarial behaviour. The model was realised in a 1977 psychology textbook illustrated by Leanne Hinton as a flow chart for both biological and computerised analogues. Learn more at Mind Hacks at the link above.
Friday 19 February 2021
6x6
polar flare: examining every map projection and how it distorts our world view at once—see previously
simon says: a vast archives of electronic handheld and table-top games and consoles from decades past—via Swiss Miss
fabian society: capitalism coexists with constructivism in Czech city of Zlรญn
hello world: the newest Martian probe beams back its first images
Friday 29 January 2021
8x8
testi stampati: the riotous typographical illustratrations of Lorenzo Petrantoni
painterly realism: Nathan Shipley trained a neural network to turn portraiture into convincingly true-to-life photographs
civilian climate corps: a vision of how putting people to work on conservation projects can help save both the environment and the economynarratology: a purportedly exhaustive list of dramatic situations—see also here and here
stonx: a long thread explaining the GameStop short-squeeze—via Miss Cellania
paradoxical undressing: National Geographic forwards a new theory to account for the Dyatlov Pass Incident (previously) of 1959
butler in a box: before digital assistants there was domestic aid in the late 1980s
will success spoil rock hunter: Art of the Title looks at the opening montage of the 1957 CinemaScope classic
Wednesday 20 January 2021
6x6
lightening never strikes twice: a meteorologist debunks some weather myths
we shall come rejoicing: digging out the sheep—rescued after a heavy snowfall
photobomb: animals interrupting wildlife photographers
draw a tattoo of a mailbox: in a reversal of sorts, compete with other human sketch artist to prove to an AI who is the most accomplished—via Waxy
conspiracist ideation: what to do about QAnon
Thursday 7 January 2021
dall·e
Via Waxy, we make the acquaintance of a namesake (a portmanteau of the Pixar character and Salvador Dalรญ) neural network that generates, using Open AI, images from captions. It’s still too brittle, its minders say, for free-text (see also) but one can play Mad-Libs with a certain string of prompts to get an idea of its virtuosity and capabilities.
This first array of images is in response to the cutline a triangular, yellow manhole cover. The second, poetically, is a fox—made of voxels—sitting in a field. The network even demonstrates learning in geographical facts, fashion and dating styles and technology, though some seem better informed than others.
Monday 28 December 2020
small town snow globe refillery
Sunday 20 December 2020
8x8
before times: one narrative of 2020 as told through fifteen objects and artefacts—see previously
marsha, marsha, marsha: Trump acknowledges months’ long cyber-attack on US government networks for first time—oddly defensive about Russian involvement
systemic bias: when bad decisions are blamed on algorithms, bad actors are exculpated and trust in science erodesbreakthrough listen: musing on the nature of signal detected from Proxima Centauri by the Murriyang Radio Telescope
tape/slide newsreel group and friends: brilliant early 80s photo archive showing Hackney to Hackney—via the splendiferous Things Magazine
engineer, agitator, constructor: the visual vernacular of utopian graphic design
creek and culvert: the movement to resurface and revive long buried urban waterways—see previously
off-limits: virtually visit nine sites not accessible to the public in Washington, DC
a modern hanukah miracle: there are extra doses of vaccine in each vial—stretching out supplies to inoculate twice as many individuals than expected
Monday 30 November 2020
8x8
regolith: British R&D company working on process to extract oxygen from lunar soil and using the by-product to three-dimensionally print a moon base—via the New Shelton wet/dry
gentle giant: David Prowse, the British weight-lifter and character actor who played Darth Vader, has passed away
person, woman, man, camera, tv: Sarah Andersen’s funny take on our future senilitykung-fu grip: new research suggests that Neanderthals did not use their hands and thumbs in the same way as Homo sapiens
handkerchief flirting codes for post-humans: Janelle Shane (previously) trains a neural network on late Victorian courtship etiquette
wilmarsdonk: the remains of a village in the middle of the Port of Antwerp, mostly vacated for the busy shipping hub’s expansion
social harmony: queuing guests practise distancing on a length of music notation, producing a movement from Gymnopรฉdie
pareidolia, apophenia: brain neurons juxtaposed with galactic clusters connected by filaments of dark matter
Wednesday 25 November 2020
this x does not exist
A catchall snowclone for all the passingly convincing artifices that artificial intelligence can generate, this website—via the always interesting and authentic Things Magazine—aggregates various platforms specialising in showcasing one synthetic feline, real estate, memes, business start-up, equine, etc.—a few we’ve encountered beforehand (see previously here, here and here) and were responsible for creating a few virtual non-beings.
catagories: ๐ญ, ๐ค, networking and blogging
Monday 23 November 2020
franรงoise harddisk
Via Kicks Condor, we are directed towards the Organizing Committee and their experimental musical collaboration inspired by Chilean president’s Salvadore Allende’s Project Cybersyn designed to empower the people through direct democracy, soliciting universal and instantaneous feedback with “algedonic meters,” having employed socialist cybernetic folk music as an educational and promotional campaign to introduce the public to this vast and ambitious initiative. Its implementation was tragically pre-empted by the fascist coup of Augusto Pinochet in 1973—but at least one song in the new genre was recorded: “Letania para una computadora y para un niรฑo que va a nacer” (Litany for a Computer and a Child Yet to Be Born) by Angel Parra as well as the construction of an operations centre that has the look and feel of a Star Trek bridge. The cyborg pop album produced is co-written by a host of machine learning models, synthesising instrumentals and lyrics, and consists of thirteen tracks with a human at the helm for creative control. Much more to explore with the liner notes and all the songs at the link above.
Monday 12 October 2020
what colour am i to you
For example, one recent one but probably gone through its entire life cycle by the time of publication is the fairly straightforward summons to self-identify one’s aural colour and energy and description with the human-juried ones appearing first. The following graphic illustrates hues suggested by the neural network and fitting captions. We especially liked Midnight: suave but I definitely stole their wallet and Zucchini: looks delicious, sweet and innocent but “actually really murder.” Much more at the links above. Sea foam green: time lord/bodega cat.
catagories: ๐ค, networking and blogging
Friday 18 September 2020
the long now
Having previously (see here and here) assayed the conundrum of deflecting curious future explorers from spelunking in our present nuclear waste, we were intrigued to see what sort of out-the-box solutions our artificial intelligencer Janelle Shane (see previously) might be able to coax out of her neural network to serve as a ten-thousand year warning. Summarising the schema to the GPT-3 routine, its designs seemed to match that of its human engineering inspiration to intrigue as much as dissuade any future civilisation. Giant tube worms and a field of Tulips Shrieking Madness might deter exploration but I am not sure about Dangerous Stairs or Disrupted Pollen Lines. Much more to explore at the links above.
Friday 11 September 2020
deceptive cadence
Back during the early 1980s composer William Basinski heard a snatch of music on the airwaves and quickly recorded the melody that it inspired and filed it away for use in a later project. Sitting forgotten until the summer of 2001, Basinski rediscovers the recording and plays it back.
The tape, however, was old and brittle and playing it back, it began to disintegrate both visually and audibly—Basinski, fascinated, captured its vanishing. Nearly finished remixing his Disintegration Loops at his New York studio on 11 September, his epic became an elegy. Fast-forward to the summer of 2019, Robin Sloan just acquainted with the moving orchestral piece—we discover courtesy of Things Magazine—had a neural network interpret the work with some surprising results and invites others to listen and contribute to his Integration Loop project.